We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.
A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think
Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.
Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.
Browse videos featuring experts across a wide range of disciplines, from personal health to business leadership to neuroscience.
Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.
Big Think’s Edge learning platform for career mentorship and professional development provides engaging and actionable courses delivered by the people who are shaping our future.
Big ideas in little doses
What's the Big Idea? Marijuana has "high abuse potential" and no "currently accepted medical use." That is how marijuana is classified by federal bureaucrats, even though that view is very much out of sync with the opinions of many doctors and scientists. This designation is the legacy of the ...
In 1968 Peter Brook wrote: In New York, potentially, there is one of the best audiences in the world. Unfortunately, it seldom goes to the theatre. It seldom goes to the theatre because the the prices are too high. Certainly it can afford these prices, but it has been let down too often. ...
"He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches." So wrote George Bernard Shaw in his 1903 Maxims for Revolutionists . Shaw, who humorously dismissed secondary education as "sequestration and imprisonment of children so as to prevent them being a continual nuisance to their parents," had great contempt ...
What's the Big Idea? It costs more to treat sick people than it does to prevent people from getting sick in the first place. And so it is with global warming. It is cheaper to stave off the effects of catastrophic climate change than it is to pay the tab for natural disasters as they occur ...
What's the Big Idea? If Western philosophy begins with the Greek philosopher Thales, it begins with the question of whether humans can ever arrive at the dream of "knowing all there is to know." Thales had his answer. Water held the key to understanding the universe. It was believed to be the ...
I know I'm not the only one who had to search the Internet to find the channel number for OWN, the poorly-rated network Oprah Winfrey launched in 2011. My sudden interest in OWN, of course, is Oprah's interview with Lance Armstrong that will air in two parts tonight and tomorrow. This super ...
In October the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency released a scathing report identifying Lance Armstrong as the ruthlessly-driven mastermind of a 10-year doping scheme. Armstrong, a cancer survivor and an inspiration to millions, was shown to be deceitful, manipulative and remorseless -- many of the telltale ...
Every year since 1967, the world's technology companies gather at the International Consumer Electronics Show to exhibit the latest flashy products they've been working on. For the tech nuts who need to experience the absolute cutting edge in consumer technology, it's the greatest show on Earth ...
"Third prize is you're fired," snarls Alec Baldwin's character Blake in the film version of Glengarry Glen Ross. Blake is excoriating a group of real estate agents for their flat sales numbers. In response to this verbal abuse, the agents proceed to lie, cheat and steal in order to peddle shoddy ...
The debate over Chuck Hagel's nomination for Secretary of Defense has centered around a number of his past positions that seem to have very little to do with the principal role he has been appointed to serve -- overseeing the downsizing of the military industrial complex. The position of ...
Consider this scenario. Due to protectionist trade policies, you pay 41 percent more for sugar than the rest of the world, and yet you tend to consume it not as the kind of natural sugar that is found in breast milk, but in the form of processed sugars such as high-fructose corn syrup. You make a ...
In 1968, Andy Warhol made the now-famous prediction that "in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." To put it another way, the "hierarchy of subjects worthy to be represented has been abolished," which is how the art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh interpreted Warhol's ...
If you love geology, chances are you had a great teacher who introduced you to the subject. Most likely that teacher didn't simply teach you to appreciate rocks, but also instilled in you a greater curiosity about the evolutionary history of life. In short, this teacher made learning geology a ...
What's the Big Idea? Big Data is watching you. And it's big business. Credit card companies, for instance, are selling the data about what you're consuming. So why is it that you, as the person manufacturing the data, has no say over who's using it or what they're doing with it? "That’s got to ...
Will you be better off this year than your were in the past? To the futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil, the answer is a resounding yes. "We are far more productive and healthy and better off in every way than we were in the past," Kurzweil, the author of the new book How to Create a Mind: The ...